Eucalyptus globulus Labill is one of the most important economic forest species in Portugal, occupying an area of 875.10³ ha in a total forest area of 3346.10³ ha (Tomé et al., 2007). The main goal of this study is to develop a dominant height growth model for Eucalyptus, applicable throughout the country, representing an improve of the curves that are part of the whole stand model existing in Portugal, the GLOBULUS model (Tomé et al., 2001). The dominant height growth model will be built on a biological...

Plants and animals have highly ordered structure both in time and in space, and one of the main questions of modern developmental biology is the transformation of genetic information into the regular structure of organism. Any multicellular plant begins its development from the universal unicellular state and acquire own species-specific structure in the course of cell divisions, cell growth and death, according to own developmental program. However the cellular mechanisms of plant development are...

This paper demonstrates the development of a simple model of carbon flow during plant growth. The model was developed by six undergraduate students and their instructor as a project in a plant ecophysiology course. The paper describes the structure of the model including the equations that were used to implement it in Excel®, the plant growth experiments that were conducted to obtain information for parameterizing and testing the model, model performance, student responses to the modeling project,...

Plant growth occurs due to cell proliferation in the meristem. We model the case of apical meristem specific for branch growth and the case of basal meristem specific for bulbous plants and grass. In the case of apical growth, our model allows us to describe the variety of plant forms and lifetimes, endogenous rhythms and apical domination. In the case of basal growth, the spatial structure, which corresponds to the appearance of leaves, results...

Artists have long recognized that trees are self-similar across enormous differences in magnitudes; i.e., they share a common fractal structure - a trunk subdivides into branches which subdivide into more branches which eventually terminate in leaves, flowers, fruits, etc. Artistid Lindenmayer (1971, 1975, 1989, 1990) invented a mathematics based on graph grammar rewriting systems to describe such iteratively branching structures; these were named in honor of him and are referred to as L-systems....

Seeds of sunflowers are often modelled by $n⟼{\varphi }_{\theta }\left(n\right)=\sqrt{n}{e}^{2i\pi n\theta }$ leading to a roughly uniform repartition with seeds indexed by consecutive integers at angular distance $2\pi \theta$ for $\theta$ the golden ratio. We associate to such a map ${\varphi }_{\theta }$ a geodesic path ${\gamma }_{\theta }:{ℝ}_{\>0}⟶{\mathrm{PSL}}_2\left(\mathbb{Z}\right)\setminus ℍ$ of the modular curve and use it for local descriptions of the image ${\varphi }_{\theta }\left(\mathbb{N}\right)$ of the phyllotactic map ${\varphi }_{\theta }$.

One of the most intriguing questions in life science is how living organisms develop and maintain their predominant form and shape via the cascade of the processes of differentiation starting from the single cell. Mathematical modeling of these developmental processes could be a very important tool to properly describe the complex processes of evolution and geometry of morphogenesis in time and space. Here, we summarize the most important biological knowledge on plant development, exploring the...

We investigate the structure of travelling waves for a model of a fungal disease propagating over a vineyard. This model is based on a set of ODEs of the SIR-type coupled with two reaction-diffusion equations describing the dispersal of the spores produced by the fungus inside and over the vineyard. An estimate of the biological parameters in the model suggests to use a singular perturbation analysis. It allows us to compute the speed and the profile of the travelling waves. The analytical results...

The development of functional-structural plant models has opened interesting perspectives for a better understanding of plant growth as well as for potential applications in breeding or decision aid in farm management. Parameterization of such models is however a difficult issue due to the complexity of the involved biological processes and the interactions between these processes. The estimation of parameters from experimental data by inverse methods...

In this article, we build a mathematical model to understand the formation of a tree leaf. Our model is based on the idea that a leaf tends to maximize internal efficiency by developing an efficient transport system for transporting water and nutrients. The meaning of “the efficient transport system” may vary as the type of the tree leave varies. In this article, we will demonstrate that tree leaves have different shapes and venation patterns mainly because they have adopted different efficient...

We present a dynamic geometric model of phyllotaxis based on two postulates, primordia formation and meristem expansion. We find that Fibonacci, Lucas, bijugate and multijugate are all variations of the same unifying phenomenon and that the difference lies in the changes in position of initial primordia. We explore the set of all initial positions and color-code its points depending on the phyllotactic pattern that arises.

In this article a variational reduction method, how to handle the case of heterogenous domains for the Transport equation, is presented. This method allows to get rid of the restrictions on the size of time steps due to the thin parts of the domain. In the thin part of the domain, only a differential problem, with respect to the space variable, is to be approximated numerically. Numerical results are presented with a simple example. The variational...

Plant growth depends essentially on nutrients coming from the roots and metabolites produced by the plant. Appearance of new branches is determined by concentrations of certain plant hormones. The most important of them are Auxin and Cytokinin. Auxin is produced in the growing, Cytokinin in either roots or in growing parts. Many dynamical models of this phenomena have been studied in [1]. In [5], the authors deal with one branch model. In this work,...